Where is contribution most needed to the D community?

FreeSlave freeslave93 at gmail.com
Fri Jan 10 03:36:49 PST 2014


The current state of Phobos documentation is terrible in some 
moments. Many types and functions are not described how to use. 
For example, from documentation I don't know how to use 
ErrnoException. Does it have field for error code copied from 
errno, or should I use errno directly when I meet this exception? 
What message does ErrnoException provide? It's from stderror 
function or some dependent on caller? Plenty of questions arise 
when you need to know how do class or function work, and you 
often need to browse source code to find out what happens. But 
ideally documentation must be full, so user does not have to look 
into sources.

There is also sensible lack of examples. Look at std.encoding. 
Well, actually I'm sure that the whole module needs to be 
rewritten, I don't see any benefits of "templated" approach to 
work with encoding.
Other thing is "auto" as returned type. It's very handy in code, 
but I think library documentation should mark returned types more 
explicitly.
So there is many work on Phobos documentation to make it better.

Also there are some deprecated modules needed for replacement, 
for example, std.stream and std.socketstream (but I'm not sure 
why). I believe streams are important to ease programming, but 
they need really good interface and implementation (flexible and 
extensible), maybe you have some ideas on it.


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list